It took Cahill until late March to sign last offseason, when he reunited with his first major league team, the Athletics, for a guaranteed $1.5MM. That proved to be a bargain for Oakland, which saw Cahill serve as an important part of a patchwork rotation and help the club to a wild-card berth. Cahill finished first among A’s starters in fWAR (2.0), second in starts (20) and third in innings (110), and managed a quality 3.76 ERA/3.54 FIP with 8.18 K/9, 3.35 BB/9, a 53.4 percent groundball rate and a personal-best 11.7 percent swinging-strike mark. He also dealt with multiple injuries along the way, though, which has often been the case throughout his career.
Cahill was a prolific innings eater with the A’s and Diamondbacks from 2009-12, a span in which he ranked 29th in the majors in frames (925 2/3) and twice exceeded the 200 barrier. Since then, however, Cahill has only gone beyond the 145-inning plateau once – when he amassed 146 2/3 with Arizona in 2013 – thanks to both injuries and time spent as a reliever. But Cahill, who’s also a former Brave, Cub, Royal and Padre, has functioned primarily as a starter since 2017 and turned in decent results when healthy. With the Padres and Royals two years ago, he combined for 14 starts and recorded a 4.38 ERA/4.30 FIP with 9.75 K/9, 4.13 BB/9, leading Oakland to take a low-cost flier on him an offseason ago.
Now, thanks to his reemergence as a viable starter over the past couple years, it appears Cahill’s poised to reel in a far more lucrative contract than he received nine months ago. MLBTR predicts Cahill will land a two-year, $22MM pact as he gears up for his age-31 season.
]]>If Boras was not quite fully committing, he nevertheless did not leave much wiggle room for his client. “Kyler has every intention of fulfilling his agreement with the A’s,” said Boras, who adds that Murray “will be in Spring Training with the A’s” (as Fancred’s Jon Heyman indicated earlier this week, on Twitter).
That’s good news for the Oakland organization, which surprised many by taking Murray ninth overall. There is no questioning his immense athletic ability, of course, but the collegiate star is much more accomplished and polished on the gridiron — if only due to the fact that he has focused his attention to that higher-profile collegiate pursuit.
Notably, as Slusser explains, the A’s have a lot to lose if Murray changes his mind. While the club would get its money back, it wouldn’t receive a compensatory pick as occurs in situations where no agreement is consummated in the first place. As part of the initial deal with Murray, the Athletics organization agreed to allow him to finish out his career at OU.
Murray himself had raised a few eyebrows with recent comments in which he seemingly indicated there was still an opening for a football future. Certainly, his draft stock has risen after an immense season for the Sooners, though it still seems unlikely he’d be considered at the very top of the draft class due to his short stature. Regardless, Boras suggests that Murray’s words shouldn’t be parsed too closely. After all, he is being pressed with attention as he nears a potential Heisman Trophy.
]]>Nov. 20, 6:48 PM: The Athletics announced today that they have acquired righty Tanner Anderson from the Pirates. The Oakland organization has also added four players to its 40-man roster to protect them from the Rule 5 draft: outfielders Luis Barrera and Skye Bolt along with righties Grant Holmes and James Kaprielian.
Anderson is a 25-year-old who was originally taken in the 20th round of the 2015 draft. He has steadily marched through the Pittsburgh farm since becoming a professional, working as both a starter and reliever. He shifted to the pen full-time in 2018.
Though he hasn’t typically produced exciting strikeout numbers, Anderson limits the free passes and long balls. And he has generally produced outstanding groundball numbers. Indeed, Anderson has yet to finish a season with less than a 60% groundball rate. In the just-completed season,he worked to a 2.64 ERA with 7.2 K/9 and 2.2 BB/9 in 61 1/3 innings.
]]>It had been widely expected that Fiers would return to Oakland. After all, the A’s certainly need arms and he was quite successful in 2018 on both sides of the trade that sent him out west from the Tigers. He ended the season with a 3.56 ERA in 172 innings.
Still, Fiers projected to earn a hefty $9.7MM salary. And the results came in spite of some rough underlying stats. Fiers checked in with 7.3 K/9 and 1.9 BB/9, but coughed up 32 home runs — the same tally he allowed in the prior campaign. All of the major ERA estimators value him as a 4+ performer over each of the past four campaigns.
Graveman, meanwhile, is still recovering from Tommy John surgery and will likely miss most or all of the 2019 campaign. But he’s an interesting pitcher who should draw plenty of looks on the market. Gearrin, too, seems like a prime target as a steady veteran reliever. The A’s simply preferred not to pay their salaries, which were projected at $2.5MM and $2.4MM, respectively.
]]>We’ll track today’s pre-tender agreements here, with all referenced projections coming courtesy of MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz…
Earlier Agreements
Khris Davis enters his third year of arbitration under somewhat familiar conditions—with a .247 average (matching his exact batting average in each season from 2015 through 2017) and at least 40 home runs in his platform season. Coincidences aside, my model sees him getting his biggest raise ever, a $7.6MM bump, good for an $18.1MM salary projection. Last year, he got a $5.5MM raise from his initial $5MM salary in his first year of arbitration.
With career highs of 48 home runs and 123 runs batted in, it is pretty logical that Davis is projected to get his biggest raise yet. On top of that, the same type of performance in the third year of arbitration eligibility is typically associated with a larger raise than it would in the second year of eligibility.
Davis’ case obviously hinges on his power numbers, which is certainly a fortunate skill to possess when it comes to arbitration; power is the skill the arbitration system favors most heavily. Looking for appropriate comparables for Davis is going to require looking for other players who have had significant tallies of the right counting stats, so we should restrict our search to prominent sluggers.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the past decade, only one player has hit 40 home runs going into his third year of arbitration: Todd Frazier, two years ago. Frazier only hit .225 that year and fell just short of 100 RBIs with 98. Davis hit eight more home runs than Frazier did, too. Putting that together, we get an absolute floor of the $3.75MM raise from Frazier’s case.
Even if we soften the home run requirement to 35 and require 100 RBIs, we only get one player in the past five years: Charlie Blackmon, last year. He got a $6.7MM raise for hitting .331 with 37 home runs and 104 runs batted in. There was some debate last year about whether that was enough of a raise, with some rival agents taking shots through the media claiming he should have gotten more. If applied back to Blackmon’s case, the current iteration model does project his 2017 season to support a larger raise of $7.8 million. That also means that the model slightly prefers that season, with its lofty batting average but lesser power stats, to the one just turned in by Davis. All things considered, Blackmon seems like a pretty solid overall comparable, one that either side in the Davis case could argue off of.
It is difficult to come up with other comparables in recent years, but if Davis and the A’s go further back, they might want to look for someone who led the league in home runs like Davis did going into his third year of arbitration. That would be Matt Kemp, who got a $5.05 million raise for his .324/39/126 season in 2011. That is obviously very stale, but it makes it plausible that Davis could get a similar kind of raise with inflation, although his batting average was obviously worse.
With so few plausible comparables, it is difficult to know what Davis could command. In such situations, I would lean towards the model, especially without much evidence that the number was too high or too low. Regardless, in the current era with so many home runs being hit league wide, it will be interesting to see how this affects future cases for guys like Davis who hit so many home runs. Of course, we may not get to see a one-year settlement. The relationship seems to be working for both sides and all involved surely remain mindful of the open market’s devaluation of sluggers, so it would not be surprising to see a multi-year agreement of some kind.
]]>Renderings and other information are available here. They show a waterfront facility that might be described as baseball’s version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A fan-accessible, greenscaped ring (the club calls it an “elevated park”) surrounds a much tamer inner stadium that’s notable mostly for its ample provision of standing room and snug, 34k-seat capacity.
There’s more to this than the architecture, of course. The proposal, like most other ballpark projects we’ve seen of late, would include plans for mixed-use development featuring “housing, including affordable housing, offices, retail, small business space and restaurants, hotels, public gathering spaces, and parks.” Transportation challenges could be met in part by a gondola system connecting to downtown Oakland, which certainly sounds like a unique new way to get to a ballgame.
As with the Rays, the other MLB organization that realistically lacks a contemporary stadium and has recently proposed a striking new facility, public handouts will not completely carry this project through. In this case, while the A’s will surely seek public support in a variety of ways — acquiring rights to the site, to take but one notable example — the club says it will fully finance the ballpark construction through private means.
Needless to say, it’s quite an ambitious overall undertaking that will take some time to pull off. The team says it hopes to break ground in 2021 and open the ballpark in time for the 2023 season. For a perennially underfunded A’s club, there’s a lot at stake. As the organization itself claims on the stadium website, getting the new facility up is necessary to “retain our players and build a more competitive team.”
]]>Here’s a rundown of players who’ve been added to their respective 40-man rosters (which will be updated throughout the day)…
Here’s the latest chatter on the rest of the market: